Believing
by light at last
Summary: Jane believed that Will was special. Companion piece to Knowing


I believed I was in love with Will Stanton when I was sixteen years old. That may seem like a strange place to start, but it was important. Not because I actually was in love with him, but because I wasn't. There was no reason I shouldn't love him. I did love him, actually, I just wasn't in love with him. Did that make any sense? Will always made me a little confused, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that talking about him confuses me. Anyway, Will was everything a girl could want: smart, sweet, cute, musical. He was even a pretty good dancer. Bran can't dance at all. But Will was always good in a deep down all through to his soul kind of way that I couldn't match, couldn't even really relate to. He was a great friend, though, compassionate, and so humble you almost forgot how remarkable he was.

I believed, and still believe, that his family never really saw Will. Or maybe they saw who he chose to show them, the him he was for them, if you know what I mean. They never saw the Will I saw, making a whole Welsh mountain sing, or saying "We've a long way to go," and clearly meaning more than we could ever understand by it. I think Paul saw, just a bit, and Barb even less, but still something. I could see it in the way that Paul looked at Will sometimes, like he was waiting for something, or in the way that Barb hovered. Everyone thought that was because they'd almost lost Will at twelve, but she told me once she always expected Will to disappear, like he belonged somewhere else, somewhere better. I think that she expected me to laugh at her, but I just told her I'd felt the same way.

I believed that Will practically ordered Bran to ask me out for years before it was confirmed. It was a funny story, told in Will's happy voice and Bran's lilting one, in that tag team way they'd perfected at age fourteen. I was glad that Will had done it, but a little surprised. Will never told anyone what to do. He would ask, of course, but he never demanded. He never even asked in that special way that boys on whom you have crushes have, that makes you feel like you have to agree. With Will, you always had a choice. I think he was actually scared to order, and it was another mystery about Will. It was even stranger that it was Bran because Will had this sort of deferential thing around Bran that I don't think either of them ever really noticed. When I asked him why he chose this instance to act, he said, "The world is left to men, to make their own choices, to the best of their ability and without aid…but daft friends are an exception."

I believe there was something more to that story about Will's eleventh birthday than James, who told it to me, thought. Will, it seems, wished for real, proper snow for his birthday on Midwinter's Eve every single year, but that year he got it, real, proper snow that quickly led to an unending freeze that forced evacuation to the manor. And then came that mysterious bum, who seemed totally insane and mostly dead, and suddenly disappeared the day the cold broke, the same day Mary went missing for several hours, and Mrs. Stanton had a potentially deadly fall down the stairs due to a poorly timed flash of lightning. That seems like a lot of weird coincidences surrounding Will to me. But then, maybe I'm reading into it too much, simply because what other people see as coincidences and Will would call fate, seem to happen a lot around Will. Like all those times Will showed up just in time to mediate between James, who was for a time a very angry teenager, and whoever he was about to get in a fistfight with. Or when he popped into a room just in time to stop Paul's antique flute from dropping off the counter. I don't know how he did it, but it was helpful sometimes. I think he was particularly useful when it came to James, because James wouldn't fight when Will was around. We were never entirely sure if it was because he was ashamed to in front of his good little brother, or that he didn't want his rather delicate looking brother accidentally involved, and no one's ever asked him.

I believe, as Bran does, that Will will come back in his own time. I think he simply needed to grow up away from his large family. That family has always been protective, since Will never really grew properly. But I believe that Will will come back, because while I'm not in love with Will Stanton anymore, I do love him, and he loves us.


End file.
